27

New Dark

"Then a gasp as from many throats, and a babel of barked and bleated words – 'Lilith, Great Lilith, behold the Bridegroom!'" – H. P. Lovecraft, "The Horror at Red Hook"

The wedding of Suzuki Kaito and Gensai Rei had taken place in a hotel's wedding chapel. It had been a Western-style affair, and had, as expected, ended fairly early. The rest of the day was taken up with celebrations in various locations around the city, these celebrations including several hours' worth of dinner at an upscale restaurant, and, just as night began to fall, a cruise through Tokyo Bay. It had been a pleasant day for Kaito, but tiring in the extreme, and he eventually escaped friends and family on the pretense of using the restroom.

He examined his face a while in the mirror above the sink, realized after a while that he did need to use the facilities after all, did so, then lit a cigarette. He was just turning to rejoin the party when the door opened. From where Kaito stood he could only see the hand of the person opening the door, and was surprised to see long purple nails on their fingers. He opened his mouth to warn the woman that she had the wrong room, but wound up saying nothing, though his mouth remained open.

There were two reasons for his silence. First of all, the woman was dressed very oddly. A sort of half robe, rich purple in color, covered her from the waist down. Her upper body was clothed in what seemed to be black rubber, of all things. He had never seen someone dressed so strangely, and wondered how he had possibly missed seeing her on board before now.

The second reason the words died in his throat was that she was stunningly beautiful. Full lips, painted violet like the fingernails, deep blue eyes, their expression inviting, her figure… Kaito stood silent as she slipped through the doorway. She raised the hand that had opened the door, her left hand, palm upwards, and slowly closed her fingers. Kaito staggered forward and stopped directly in front of her, his body quivering. Had he not been so bewitched he would have noticed some additional oddities about her that he had not seen at first glance – the ornate horned headdress, the black batwings.

The woman dropped her left arm to her side and raised the right. Kaito, who did not have much idea at that moment of where he was or what he had spent the day doing, noticed the movement but did not turn his head to look at her hand, instead keeping his gaze locked on her face and body. Vaguely he had the impression that she was about to stroke his left cheek. He was right, but – her hand was so cold and hard.

And painful.

With a smile and a whirl she was gone, leaving Kaito alone. His face hurt. It burned. He shot up a hand and touched his cheek as the woman had done, simultaneously turning again towards the mirror. His fingers felt something like the blackened skin of a hotdog, and as the pain burrowed deeper into the side of his face he removed his hand and saw what was happening to him. He screamed and bolted from the restroom, cold tingling giving way to hot pain in his fingertips.

Kaito careened off a wall and staggered onto the deck, where he fell among a group of his friends, drawing more yells and screams as they watched his flesh rot and shrivel. There was no one with medical knowledge on board, and it might not have made a difference if there had been. In several minutes little remained of the groom, whose life had ended partway through the process.

Only one of the passengers overheard, among the shouts and confusion, a woman's shrill laugh drift over the dark waters of the bay.

Iori was not the first of the six youngest Chosen Children to fall asleep that night, but he was the first to dream. He didn't realize that he was asleep at first. Unconsciousness fed so slowly into an awareness of being that when he found himself once more within Submarimon's cockpit he did not question how he had gotten there. As to what they were doing, they were going to see Neptunemon, to upbraid him for ignoring the plight of his subjects.

They had never been this deep before. The sunlight barely filtered through to their location, and the water surrounding them was so dark that it was hard to see. Submarimon continued to descend, wordlessly. Iori thought it very strange that it was so dark so near to Neptunemon's palace. He expected that the king of the ocean would live surrounded by beauty, which, even if it was a type of beauty strange to land-dwellers, would not be so devoid of light.

"Submarimon, are we sure this is the right area?"

His partner was silent.

"Submarimon?"

No answer.

"Submarimon, why won't you—" He stopped as the ocean floor came into view. Some distance away, Iori could just make out a black mass, topped with towers and turrets. There was no light shining from within. Nearer to them was something else, an intricate symbol carved into the seabed.

Submarimon did not slow in his descent, or change direction to make for Neptunemon's darkened castle. Iori was going to try another question when it occurred to him that this entire time his partner had never once adjusted his speed or direction, and had remained quiet. Quiet – it was very quiet. Iori couldn't even hear the familiar whir of Submarimon's propeller, or feel the vibration it usually caused. Was his partner even conscious?

"Submarimon!" The boy tried for several moments to rouse some kind of response, but then turned his eyes downwards once more as the silence was broken by a rumbling that seemed to rise suddenly from beneath the earth. He gasped when he saw that the gigantic design in the ocean's floor appeared to be moving. A few more seconds of closer watching revealed that it was not just moving; it was disappearing. At a rapid rate made slow by its size, the symbol was apparently erasing itself.

They had now sunk very close to the seafloor, and soon Iori could discern a network of cracks and fissures appearing and spreading across the flooded earth. One grew particularly wide, and shot off towards the castle. With a shuddering crash, the building's towers began to fall, and its walls to split.

Another event coincided with the palace's destruction. As in the seabed and the palace walls, a crack began to appear in the glass of Submarimon's dome.

"Submarimon, wake up!"

It must be the water pressure. If they continued to descend, they would be crushed like a soda can. Iori began to pound on the surface he was laying on, but there was no conscious response, only a sickening crunch somewhere behind and below him. Soon the dome was a spider web of cracks, but there was still a large enough portion of it intact for Iori to be able to look out, along the length of Submarimon's drill, and watch the destruction of the ground beneath them as the great symbol vanished, and the earth disintegrated to reveal oozing blackness.

Within moments they would plunge into that unending dark, but in the last moment there was a final crash, the glass dome shattered, and Iori, in a burst of agony that left him gasping in his bed, felt himself pulverized as water, dark, and shards poured in and devoured him.

The three boys, Taro, Hideyoshi, and Daijiro, had killed a few hours at Leisureland before deciding to head home for the night. They were middle school students making the most of their summer break, staying out as late as they wanted and wandering the oversized playground that is Odaiba. Not having anywhere to be tomorrow, they had taken their time in getting back to their apartments. While with their friends, they didn't mind walking.

It was a perfectly normal night as they approached the footbridge, but normality ended when the bulbs in the streetlights began to explode. At that moment the night sky seemed to come alive above them, and Daijiro could just make out in the gloom a swarm of bats pouring through the air. Wherever one of the creatures collided with a streetlight there was a flash of violet flame, and the bulbs would shatter, spitting glass into the street.

The boys heard several exclamations from other pedestrians as the lights went out and the bats continued on their way, slamming into the roof of the footbridge and ending their existence in a violet inferno. Taro, who had put his hands over his head when the event began, looked up once the bats had passed, and was the first to see the dark shape that descended from the sky and landed between the three boys and the covered bridge.

Hideyoshi and Daijiro noticed the silent figure, and the former took a step forward, trying to make out any details in the newly fallen darkness. A low laugh was heard, and Hideyoshi realized that the figure was a woman, dressed in black, but with skin so pale that it was the first thing he could see in the dark.

"L-Let's go back," Taro whispered. He had seen the woman's arrival, and was understandably unnerved. He took his own advice, backing slowly away from the woman and the footbridge behind her. Daijiro heard him and turned towards his friend to ask why, and that was when the figure sprang into motion.

"Stun Whip!" The woman's right arm swung outward, and the chain wrapped around it shot forward as if alive. Hideyoshi was caught around the throat, and the chain wound itself around his neck. Bruises sprang up where the links impacted the flesh, but before he realized what had happened an electrical current passed through the length of the chain. Hideyoshi's muscles locked up, and he was pulled to the ground as the woman jerked her wrist.

That was it for Taro; he turned and bolted. Daijiro fumbled for his cell phone, his shaking fingers trying to dial 110, the emergency number. His feet remained frozen; he didn't want to leave Hideyoshi, but he sure as hell wasn't going to try and help him. Eventually the number was dialed, but before he could speak into the phone the woman had disengaged her chain from Hideyoshi's limp body, and sped towards Daijiro, her right arm a crimson-tipped lance.

Hiraga was still in the underground room. More and more his employers would relegate him to what he mentally called sitting duty. He didn't complain. The pay was too good. But he found himself wondering increasingly often why they bothered to keep him employed at all. Besides spying on the children they were interested in, all he did was, well, sit. Monitoring the group's network, using various resources to keep them up to date on news from the media, from a large number of foreign groups, from the Japanese government, from the Yakuza…

Why?

They had other people more than capable of handling these jobs, and greeting Digimon. He seemed so unnecessary. It was great being paid for doing next to nothing, but it was unusual, and the unusual worried him. Hiraga had not suffered from any of the nightmares which had afflicted the general population for the past few days, but he had been told by his employers that they were occurring, and he had heard enough gossip to know that the group was telling the truth. That was more than unusual. There was always a small voice in the back of his mind: Ayaki, you are going to regret dealing with these people. Who knows how far this is going to go?

The police were being flooded with emergency calls now, as the Digimon struck one by one. No one was safe, awake or asleep. The nightmares weren't just in the mind anymore, Hiraga thought to himself. It was going to be a very long night.